Telling the truth – 11 May 2012

St Benedict, about 1500 years ago, wrote what he called a Rule, which set out how Christians could and should live together. It sounds daunting, but it is actually both liberal and flexible. Benedict called it a little rule for beginners. In it he says among many other things that you can’t have Christian community without truthfulness. Sister Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun of our day, and this is what she writes about truthfulness: Dissimulation, half answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self, are all barbs in the soul of the monastic. Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed. This is not the same as the person who says, “That’s just the way I am, you have to take me as you find me, what you see is what you get…” That is really as much a façade as anything else. But it does have everything to do with the real person emerging from the shadows in the gentle processes of contemplative life and prayer. The real person, the person we glimpse in our better and humbler moments, the person God always sees and knows and loves, becomes able to be truthful and open without fear, and lovingly. It is what St Paul called learning to speak the truth in love. I have been trying to better understand one of our culture’s prime buzz-words, Lifestyle. A woman in the news told the court she needs $140,000 a year from her separated husband to maintain her lifestyle. You can have a lifestyle property. You put yourself in a beautiful setting. Your friends and family, and others too, see you there, and so you feel quite safe. Somewhere inside that beautiful perimeter, lurking as it were in a broom cupboard, is the real you, which would still exist, lifestyle or not. It is this person God begins to call forth in silence and stillness. This person may never since earliest childhood been allowed to live except behind facades of one kind or another – managing image, how others see you. What will other people think? But now what matters is the truth. St Paul’s great insight was that the truth and love go together. The true person is a loving person. It is the way God made things.